Transcript of the Friday Discussion, January 18, 2008 at the CUNY Phonology Forum

Click here for an audio file of the Friday Discussion.

NOTE: There are a few points in here where a word or phrase was hard to hear, and where speakers were not identified. If anybody can fill in the missing words or names, please send an email to syllable at cunyphonologyforum dot net.

Chuck Cairns: Okay, so shall we commence with ...[today's discussion]?  And those are the questions that we used for the call for papers, and that's just sort of to prime the pump, so I'll just call on people and make my own comments, so here we go. Oh, and try to remember to say who you are, because we are recording this and we want to put it all up on the web. I hope you don't find that intimidating or anything like that. Harry? I've already identified you, okay?

Harry van der Hulst: So, do syllables exist? It seems to me, if I can go back to what I was talking about, I was mostly emphasizing the need for onsets and rimes as different branching constituents. And something I said, we are clear here on the issue of whether there should be constituents and embracing those two, and so... And then I said, well, some of the phonotactic facts seem to be best accounted for by assuming these types of constituents. And then there are other phonotactic facts that are accounted for in terms of these structural relationships, that was the second part of the paper, which are linear statements. So we seem to agree that what... and I will agree with anybody who will say that you need, let's say, linear type statements to account for phonotactic facts, but then I maintain that that account doesn't cover the whole story, and that these traditional, apparently Andrew said I was going to be controversial, but I wasn't controversial about being very traditional then in that case, but in the conext of this conference, it seems controversial to say that we do need those branching constituents as the basis for sorting out the phontactic facts that are there. So, perhaps indeed nobody has argued strictly for the existence of the syllable as a constituent, but some have argued for these onset and rime units that we might just as well call phonotactic constituents, so I would maintain that these are real.

Chuck Cairns: Paul? Paul Kiparsky?

Paul Kiparsky: Could I just make a suggestion about the way in which a discussion like this...

Chuck Cairns: Yes. Good, thank you.

Paul Kiparsky: ...a future discussion like this, might proceed? So if we take, let's say, syntax, and somebody proposes a new syntactic theory, there are certain basic phenomena that are agreed upon that they have to deal with: raising, control, and so forth. And you don't have a theory of syntax unless you handle that. So, I'm wondering if we could agree on some core phenomena or generalizations that would be important to address, that have been at least on some syllabic theories understood to be explained by syllable structure. So anyone who proposes a theory of the syllable or a non-theory; rather, a theory of the non-syllable, let's say, should provide an account of those things, so those might include, for example, the well-established typological generalizations, maybe the basic syllable typology. It might include the generalizations about phonotactics about, perhaps, compensatory lengthening, and maybe some core facts about English or other well-known languages, let's say, Kahn's stuff. And the people who introduce new ideas should take care to have a story about those, otherwise we end up talking past each other, and I have a sense that in some of the talks, that was happening.

Chuck Cairns: Can we do that here now? I mean, can we... Shanti?

Shanti Ulfsbjoerninn: I feel slightly guilty of Paul's comments in a way, and I understand the need for having a kind of unified core of facts, which would say, at least for dealing with phonology and something else. But I will say that that can't be done by taking for example like, let's say, the theory must account for, let's say, branching codas, when not every theory of phonology accepts that these even exist, so I think that one would have to be very careful about the kind of criteria that one has to meet, although I do agree with a kind of syllable, basic syllable typology like the example I've given. If your theory actually excludes CV segments, then you're in trouble. So I just promote caution in choosing what things to use as validating your theory.

Anthony Lewis: A starting point might be just something very basic, like: why do we seem to see lenition and consonant deletion in syllable-final position and not in syllable-onset position? As a starting point, in many languages.

Eric Raimy: May I make a friendly revision to that? Why do we find lenition, or the phenomena that you asked in particular contexts? So remove the discussion of onset versus codas, because that...

Chuck Cairns: It loads it.

Eric Raimy: ... the facts of the matter is that, what we see is that lenition occurs in particular contexts and not in others. Some people would say, "Ah, that's a coda context. That's why it happens there. In onset, it does not." But that, as Shanti pointed out, that biases the discussion immediately by building syllables...

Chuck Cairns: Yeah. Donca?

Donca Steriade: So just continuing Paul's remark, I think that the critical fact we need to address all is the possibility of convergence between that the various phenomena that have been explained in terms of the syllable are telling us about where the syllable is, is where it begins, where it ends, and what internal structure it has. So I think that a lot of the literature has pursued that the hope of explanation through the syllable as the tool of the explanation, without checking that we're getting convergence on the same boundries for the syllable that the facts about rhythmic alternations between light and heavy syllables need to converge on the same syllable cut that the phonotactic explanations require. And frequently we're not getting that convergence, so it seems to be that, yes, we do need to understand what any new theory's account of the old phenomena ought to be, but we also have to make sure that these phenomena are converging on telling us that the syllable is in the same place, in order to explain each and every one of them.

Eric Raimy: Actually, can I make a friendly revision to that too?

Chuck Cairns: Yeah, yeah.

Eric Raimy: So, I think we need to ask the question of what parallels of convergence and non-convergence on evidence can we find in other parts of language, because if we look at lexical access, it appears that language looks very discrete. Digital, classical phonemes appear to be the way that it works, because apparently that's what lexical access does. But if we go look at socio-phonetics, now it looks completely gradient, because not only do we have to have information, very subtle phonetic information about different judgments about social class and gender, but we have to nail it down for individual speakers. So it's not that there's a problem with the syllable in the conflict, that we're not finding convergence of the results. It's the fact that we don't have any idea how to get convergence on the results of language because we always try to meet it as one model, one thing. So we have to kind of parse out, just kind of like with Marie-Helene and her student giving the posters, we have to ask like, what is the exact task? What is our exact probe probing for? And recognize that if we use a different probe, we may not be probing the exact same thing. So we shouldn't necessarily expect every different type of probe we have to give us the same answer. We have to have a better understanding of what the probes are doing and why we get different conflicting answers. It's a much harder task, I admit that. But that's the only rational way that I can see it goes, because you're right. I don't see convergence in the field because you read one phenomenon from one viewpoint using one methodology, you get A. The same phenomenon, different methodology, different view, you get not A. And it's the same phenomenon, so it indicates that both sides are wrong, and there's something in the middle that's right about it, not that everybody's right or everybody's wrong.

Donca Steriade: Well, you see, it seems to me that the great hope that we are all inspired by when work on the syllable began in earnest was precisely the hope of convergence of multiple phenomena in one representational unit. Insofar as that hope has sometimes been dashed, (interjection: Sometimes?) we need to understand why that is. So if that was...

Eric Raimy: Okay.

Chuck Cairns: Harry?

Harry van der Hulst: So, despite what was just said, and also, I agree with what Paul says, that we should, we can perhaps ??; suppose we had never heard of the syllable, that all of us, and that we have been in this conference listening to all these phenomena, people discussing them, having explanation so, and explanation this and that, and somebody would come in and say, "Look, I think that we can explain a lot of this stuff by this particular thing, this notion. Perhaps not all of it." I guess we all would have applauded him and given the person a Nobel Prize for phonology. You know, you are on the right track here. It does unify a lot of the stuff. So, I mean, that's my feeling and that's why, I guess I want to stop arguing and clinging to that notion, even though I agree that there are other quality explanations that have... it doesn't account for everything... And it's always good to question your assumptions and so on and so forth, but that's still the feeling I've got, that you can desperately try to avoid it and pull in this and pull in that, and do this and do that, but I still get that feeling that, Donca said, that old feeling that things started out with, that there is this thing that brings things together. But okay, I mean, is that true? I could speak about a couple phenomena in Dutch, a well-studied language, like English, regarding phonotactics and stress, where the particular assumption that, you know, that /br/ clusters as a unit, creating an open syllable to the left explains why the vowel to its left has to be tense. It has to be a tense vowel. The word for 'zebra' in Dutch, /zebra/ has to be like that: the first vowel has to be tense. That same assumption accounts for the fact that, when you have /br/, that the preceding syllable in fact is open and therefore light for stress. So these things totally converge. And can you avoid it? Yeah, you can avoid it but then you get the same problem that Venneman was talking about into the 1970s that you repeat certain observations both in your statements about tense and lax and in your statements about stress, which was the initial, you know, force of arguing that perhaps there is something there to begin with, that both of these phenomena make reference to. I think that there is such convergence in languages which, I guess, is the reason why I may want to be controversial by being traditional.

Chuck Cairns: Bill?

Bill Idsardi: Okay. I guess my feeling about all of that is sort of to be methodologically anarchistic with respect to that. So, I think the problem is, I agree with Paul that you want to eventually account for all the things that previous theories have accounted for, but, you know, there are cases where that sort of requirement just leads to an inherent conservatism. So like, the, in the speech recognition literature, you know, you have this thing where the hidden Markov models have been so prevalent because you have got to do one hundred percent better every year. And so it's been very difficult to sort of, break that out of the literature in that case, kind of because of the way that goes, and if you're not doing as well as the other groups, you know, then you're just nowhere. I mean, so you can't play the game unless you ante up the whole way. And I think the other things are true too, so as Harry said, it's like you've got this convergent set of things, which in SPE would have been handled by talking about the weak clusters or the strong clusters, without reference to any kind of syllable structure, and then the question is: How do you evaluate those things? So if you have a pattern of generalizations, does that mean that you have to have a representation? Or do you have something like SPE used, which was a series of markedness statements and simplicity metrics that allow you to say, "oh, this grammar is more highly valued than that grammar," by reusing statements in various ways. So like, you know, there was essentially a procedure that looks like something like minimum description length, where you're able to say, "okay, I've seen this string a lot. I'm allowed to call it A and then I'm allowed to make generalizations about A." But that doesn't imply necessarily that there is a structure associated with A, beyond just that string thing. So, as far as I'm concerned, there's no way to know going in whether any of those argues directly for a representation. You have your account and your account works or it doesn't work so whatever... and as you pile together your things, you group them in different ways and other people group them, well, you're going to have convergence on one thing and divergence on something else. I don't see any particular way... I don't, I think it's a general problem in science. I don't see any way of knowing going in that this convergence is better than that convergence. That getting A and B grouped together is better than getting A and C grouped together.

Chuck Cairns: Paul?

Paul Kiparsky: Yeah, I just want to add an aside to that. The only case where the minimum description length in phonology was consistently and precisely applied was Panini's grammar, where literally every technical, every concept, every category had to pay for itself. The definition, which was the part of the grammar, had to cost you less than the amount of savings that the use for that definition across the system simplified the description. And it turns out that all the interesting theoretical notions that have emerged from that: theta roles, and you name it, it's there. Ordered rules, all of the wonderful things, except, the syllable didn't. He managed, he managed without the syllable. (Inaudible interjection)

Darya Kavitskaya: Okay, the question which I have is, we are trying to answer the question, do syllables exist? But in what sense are we trying to answer it? I mean, we are trying to answer it in many senses. We are talking about syllables being in existence from the point of view of phonetics, but we don't see any evidence in articulation. Well, maybe we do because there is some, there is a collection of emergent evidence in articulatory phonology which sort of points to the existence of some kind of unit. We don't see evidence in acoustics. We are trying to debunk all evidence we see in phonology but, as Harry says, sometimes it's a bit hard to debunk even though we can show that it's not there. That with our native speakers' intuitions, and native speakers' intuitions about syllables are there. What's not there is native speakers' intuitions about syllable boundaries. I mean, this is variable. So, do we treat this kind of evidence as being the evidence for the syllable? Or do we say, "okay, fine. Native speakers of my language and many other languages will tell you what the syllables are in their language. They'll calculate [claps?] Maybe they will say the vowels. Sometimes they'll flap their consonants. But in many cases ...[?] So that's the question. What are we looking for? In what sense do syllables exist?

Anthony Lewis: Just a follow up. Can't we usually predict when native speakers will have problems in dividing syllables to a certain...? (Darya: Yeah.) Then, what does that tell us about syllables that we can then predict... let's take cases in English. So nobody has a problem with 'hotel'. At least, that's what I would assume. But there are other cases like, you know, 'rabbit', where you'll get all sorts of answers. So we could kind of, so what does it mean that we're able to... and probably in Russian or Polish that has these clusters you probably can predict, where there are situations where people want to find evidence and end up basically agreeing where there's there's going to be variation.

Darya Kavitskaya: There is, if I may, in Georgian there is also a situation with huge clusters, but in Georgian, people usually don't have any problem dividing things into syllables, except for sometimes, but it's not like in Russian.

Chuck Cairns: Harry?

Harry van der Hulst: Bill's point about referring to recurrent sequences without calling them constituents, so would you, Bill, then extend that argument in the domain of syntax? So would you then stop teaching people about constituents there and say, well no...

Bill Idsardi: No, I didn't suggest stop teaching people about them. I mean, I just... what I was arguing for was the anarchic position that you have to consider both positions, right? And there are certainly people out there, I mean not in linguistic departments, but, who would extend it to syntax. I wouldn't be one of them, but I think that it's not a bad practice to go back to first principles and say, if you've got this other explanation available to you, how much do you have left over that your theory gets that other peoples' don't? I mean, I think one of the cases that drove this home for me a long time ago was Mitch Markus's sort of discussion about what Roger Shank had been doing. And you know, his conclusion was, it was amazing how far you could get with Shank's theory. I mean, there were some things you couldn't get, but it was amazing how well it actually did, I mean, given how terrible it seemed.

Harry van der Hulst: And that's another thing about... certain people find it instructive to learn that boundaries between syllables are difficult to detect or that we have no intuitions about it. Now, I find it difficult to detect exactly where my nose starts and where it ends, you know, looking at my face, or where my ear starts and where it ends. But that doesn't take away the fact that, I suppose, in a biological sense, these are separate organs and perhaps even, I mean, at least I'm not a geneticist, but maybe at a genetic level, maybe there is a separate set of instructions there for building ears and noses, but it works out that the edges blur in the actual phenotype. So that fact that, if you think of phonetic syllables the way that you can measure them and the way that people can reflect on them, are they reflecting on phenotypic things and we have no intuitions about the structure of a nucleus, so to speak. So I'm not impressed by the fact that these boundaries are not easily detectable, because, you know, that happens in a lot... by that same token, we should all abandon segments right away, because there's no boundaries there, at least not in the sense... you know, that's what we always teach our... you know, one stream of sound. Maybe if you are a trained phonetician you can see things in a spectrogram, but, so we should abandon all these distinctions right away, because we have no intuitions about where these things stop and begin or begin and stop.

Eric Raimy: Actually, I was going to say, I think a point of unnoticed convergence in here is that, the issue that I think we're having discussion here is that, we all agree that there is some sort of distance of something in between recognizing points in the speech signal. And, the syllable approach basically says, "I have to be able to divide that in some way and then have stories of how each half of it goes." And then the minimal string length approach says, "Well, I don't care what the span is between these two points are, if I see it enough or if I can just randomly encode it." And so, I think we do share some consensus that, I think, if we model kind of like what we know about stress, is that counting one thing's okay, counting two things is okay, counting nothing, so unlimited like the Bella Coola is okay, but if we begin to have theories saying you're not allowed to have three or four or seven things between the regions, that's an unlikely syllable length, because it seems to me that all of the transitional stuff is very local. You know, it's always going into a sonorant or coming after something. It's all very local and so counting gets limited, all right? But, we know there's a limit to these long-distance effects. So, Stephanie was talking about the Abercrombian foot, which appears to put three syllables in a metric constituent, but we're counting off of stressed syllables to do that, so once again it's a local one. So I think one possible place of convergence is actually seeing what possible kind of calculations we feel comfortable with allowing and if the syllable approach accounts for it one way as it kind of counts in from the edges, and the string approach will define legitimate strings from other things. And so, I think this is, maybe I'm reading into people's interpretations of what they're saying, but this seems to be a common theme that everybody shares, is that nobody wants a constituent, however we define it, of five arbitrary things. But one arbitrary thing, two arbitrary things, or you know, no constituent, or anything appears to be fine.

Chuck Cairns: I would like to interject. I would like to ask Paul if he would accept this paraphrase of sort of the challenge you made to anybody who would propose the non-existence of syllables or at least extremely barely minimal syllables. You listed a bunch of phenomena, like for example, various kinds of typological stuff, all of the stuff that Kahn talked about, like the distinction between you know, in 'mattress' versus 'atlas', the aspiration/glottalization phonotactic stuff and stress attraction and so on. I think everyone has to agree that all of those things are within the explananda of phonological theory. You have to have a story for those. It doesn't necessarily follow that the syllable has to be the story for those. So anybody who proposes a phonological theory that does not include the syllable or has an extremely barely stripped-down syllable has to have at least some kind of plausible proposal that, all of those other phenomena that we had taken under the Kahnian and its various kinds of descendent theories of the syllable, we have to have a way of approaching those. We have to have a good story for those. So, we, you know, we don't want to lose things out from under our explananda as we propose new ideas. But it's sort of like, I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but it's sort of like the argument that atheists frequently put forward, that theists have argued for centuries that we need the notion of God to explain all of these various phenomena that we see out there in the world. Well scientists come along and sort of carved away these various things and they turned out not to be into a natural class and the number of phenomena that are left over that you have to be able to explain by invoking God gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Maybe the syllable turns out to be sort of like that. Paul?

Paul Kiparsky: Well, one way to look at it is that the description for a _____ theory has to support that, so one of the problems with Optimality Theory is that as the theory gets deeper and deeper, there's fewer and fewer ways of actually writing a grammar, so you haven't seen this great flood of Optimality Theoretic phonological descriptions of entire languages.

Chuck Cairns: That's right. Exactly, exactly.

Paul Kiparsky: It's usually just a couple forms, so it's very deep, but there's no coverage. What I'm worried about is that all these proposals for the non-existence of the syllable would have some of the same effects, that is: how does an actual phonological description look like based on that? I want there to be lots and lots of grammars of languages, including bit fat parts about phonology and any theory that allows that to go on is fine by me at some level. I also want the deepening, but I don't want that to come at the price of just ignoring everything.

Bill Idsardi: I think that's an excellent example of this tension between typological coverage versus depth of coverage in individual cases. You want them both but I don't think there's anything to see that one way is the way to go and the other way is not. You just have to do them both.

Chuck Cairns: Stephanie.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: It strikes me that if we really wanted to do what you just described, and what I think Paul is also proposing, it might be extremely useful to have a list.

Chuck Cairns: Yes. You mean a list of things that we want to explain?

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: What has the syllable been doing for us all these years that we don't want not to be able to do if we give it up?

Chuck Cairns: Yes.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: Maybe there could be a site somewhere that we could park things there.

Chuck Cairns: Well, there's one. Oh, that's not one. CUNY Phonology Forum is one. I would love to promote that discussion. Darya.

Darya Kavitskaya: If we had that list, and the explanations from your non-syllable theory, that would explain  all these things differently, have we achieved anything?

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: I think so.

Darya Kavitskaya: What have we achieved?

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: What we've achieved is the knowledge that there's more than one way to account for the things we know so far, and therefore we need more things to account for in order to distinguish which of these approaches is more appropriate.

Darya Kavitskaya: So, at that point we know that we don't know.

Harry van der Hulst: Well, you achieve something if all those other explanations are independently motivated.

Chuck Cairns: Yes. That's right, exactly.

Harry van der Hulst: Then we can get rid of God, the syllable.

Donca Steriade: I actually don't understand that. I mean, quite frequently when you... so the initial explanations in terms of the syllable for a phenomenon, they use the syllable as a descriptor, as a compact descriptor of the context in which something happens. So, in German, we get devoicing at the end of the word for obstruents. So now, it's syllable-final devoicing. It's a shorter statement than that. Do I understand why in syllable-final position I have to devoice and not in syllable-initial position? No, I don't understand that. So I think that on that website that Stephanie's proposing, we ought to... clearly it's important to have compact descriptors, but we also have to understand that when the syllable is [cough] to us, why things have to be that way and why they can't be another way.

Harry van der Hulst: Or maybe the mind isn't interested in explaining things and wants these short cuts and wants these descriptors?

Donca Steriade: Well, we don't know.

Harry van der Hulst: Well, we don't know. I know we don't know. I mean that's...

Donca Steriade: We don't know whether learners are looking simply for compact descriptors, or maybe they are also looking for quality explanations. (Interjections) We ought to keep an open mind about that.

Chuck Cairns: I want to make a procedural proposal. What I would like to do, and I want you people to guide me on this now: in the next few days, maybe a week or so after this conference, I will go through some basic literature, like Kahn, and then maybe the chapters in the Kenstowicz textbook, maybe couple of other basic places like that, and make a list of what appear to be the basic phenomena that the syllable has been put forth to explain. And I will make a link when you go to the CUNY Phonology Forum website. I know you all probably have that bookmarked, I hope. Where I have "Syllable Conference," you will click on that and I will have that out there as a list, and then maybe we can take it from there. We can have an online discussion that we will continue now, but... what do you people think of that idea? San?

San Duanmu: Sounds great. Are you going to include the distribution patterns of entire lexicons?

Chuck Cairns: Now that you mention that, of course.

Eric Raimy: As a procedural matter, I think how it should be seen is that, once this is over, this is being tape-recorded, so we'll try to transcribe what's occurred and pull anything that's said in this room as part of the starting point. And then, it's up to everyone here that if we couldn't hear or whatever, or if the transcript doesn't have the suggestion or the thing that you think needs to be covered, you need to get involved: check the website and add to it, and we'll figure out ways to make it as easy to kind of "Wiki-fy" it.

Chuck Cairns: Yeah. Shanti.

Shanti Ulfsbjoerninn: Can I find out whether people think that this is a paradox that we're kind of struggling with? It seems to me that whenever you have any formal constituent, the reason, the fact that we call it a constituent is because certain phonological processes identify it in opposition to any other. So essentially, when we ask what phonological processes show us the syllable exists, and why is it the syllable and not anything else, it's kind of paradoxical, because the answer is that the syllable exists because the phonological processes identify it. Do you see what I'm getting at?

Chuck Cairns: Yeah.

Shanti Ulfsbjoerninn: So how do we actually find out what kind of evidence we're actually going to accept that it's actually a syllable and not just anything else like an individual context?

Chuck Cairns: Exactly. Anthony Lewis.

Anthony Lewis: This is a very, very simple point, but it's just brought to mind an introductory phonology course. For the midterm, I'll always give a problem that includes things like final devoicing and syllable-related phenomena, and I'll give them some data from Spanish or something where they have a phenomenon like that. And on a couple of occasions, the students don't get the right answer in saying that this or that occurs in syllable-final position, because they're just not trained to look or they don't have that concept. And they give these correct answers: it occurs in front of /b/, /t/, /s/, and they make this list of all these things. And I try to tell them, "No, you're wrong. This is a syllable-final phenomenon and you didn't get it." They say, "But, I'm absolutely right." This is really, it's over simplistic but it's the very core of what they're saying.

Chuck Cairns: Do you mark them off?

Anthony Lewis: They're not trained to look at this constituent whatsoever, so they're looking for explanations that could be just as valid. So it's hard to tell them that they got the answer wrong.

Chuck Cairns: Bridget, did you want to say something?

Bridget Samuels: I guess so. I think the hard thing is: what really do we mean when we say the syllable exists? Back to what Dasha was saying, I mean, I don't mean to be existential here, like what do we mean by exit? But seriously, to have a UG structure is one thing, and to say that there's some kind of emergent thing is another thing, and it's really hard for me to tell what kind of evidence would argue for one and not the other.

Shanti Ulfsbjoerninn: That was a really nice condensed way of saying what I wanted to try to explain.

Donca Steriade: I think that the one thing that could argue for one thing against another is that the conditions for emergence are very likely to be very difference across languages. So you suggest that some ways in which syllables might emerge on an individual basis, that presumably the experience of the language learner is going to be different depending on whether they are speaking Bella Coola, or Berber or Italian. So then, one would expect that...

Bridget Samuels: But what's the difference...

Donca Steriade: So then the kinds of things that are emerging from that experience are going to be vastly different. But what I'm struck by is that speakers who learn Tashlhiyt on the Dell and Elmedlaoui analysis, the facts of the quantitative meter in Tashlhiyt are not emerging from a sonorific wave theory of the syllable. They are emerging from something very abstract, in which syllabic consonants are as good as vowels. They might be a /p/ but they are as good as an /a/. So this is something that we should bear in mind when we talk about emergence. Emergence is a great thing but it has to be that we need to explain the emergence of the rhythm in Tashlhiyt, where...

Bridget Samuels: Sure. Whether my theory is right or wrong is totally orthogonal...

Donca Steriade: No, no, no. I wasn't ____ ...

Bridget Samuels: No, it's fine, but I think it's very hard to compare... There's two kinds of syllable structure here. There's one where every syllable is invariant and there's the one where syllable structure is different in every language and you have to learn based on experience what syllable structure is possible. Determining between that kind of theory and an emerging theory, and the two kinds of structural theories, this is the thing ....

Bill Idsardi: They'll differ in their developmental sequence. Whether you can test that is another question. But the theory, it's just again, standard science. All these problems boil down to: what do you do when you have two extensionally equivalent theories? And that's not, there's no solution to that. There's no solution to that in physics. There's no solution to that anywhere.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: There is a next step though. There is a next step.

Bill Idsardi: Well then you have arguments about the intentional concepts. So you have extensional equivalents, and then you argue, "oh, my theory's simpler," or whatever it is.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: Well no, you can work it out.

Bill Idsardi: Sometimes. There are cases where there are no more phenomena to find. Sure, like you get this in math all the time, where not only do you have extensional equivalence, but you have things where you can prove that they're entirely equivalent.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: We're not facing that problem, in my opinion.

Bill Idsardi: I hope not, but you know, there are cases where you're going to go and you're going to say, "Well, the appropriate data is going to be this," so like developmental sequence data, and that I can't get.

Jason Shaw: Well, I'd like to add a new phenomenon then...

Chuck Cairns: Jason, Jason Shaw.

Jason Shaw: ... that could be accounted for, which is patterns of temporal coordination. So we had one [?] topic, but not much discussion about time. A lot of discussion about hierarchical structure. So another phenomenon that might help us to distinguish between theories by an empirical basis is potentially how prosodic structure unfolds in time. So I would add temporal coordination of articulatory gestures to the set of... I mean, there's very little data. We know some things. We know C-center effect in English, in Georgian, not in Berber. I will tell you some more about Moroccan Arabic from my poster if you care to stop by tomorrow. There are very little data in this area but it's something that is an empirical domain that is not tapped and potentially bears on this issue, so put it on the list.

Chuck Cairns: Will do.

Eric Raimy: I will add another phenomenon. So as far more recent psycholinguistic evidence has found frequency effects that have priming effects for syllables. The only way that I can understand that is if they're memorized somehow, just because that's how I interpret the frequency and priming effects on roots in Semitic templates and segments. So if we broaden again our types of evidence that we're willing to accept, we have this situation that either we can ignore the priming evidence and frequency evidence for syllables, but then we have to kind of ignore that information for segments and all the other things in that ____. So then it's forcing us to ask the question of, if we wanted to get rid of the syllable, how could we get rid of the syllable, but then still have those documented things?

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: Do you think it's absolutely clear that....

Eric Raimy: No,  and Joanna Cholin, who I believe has some involvement with that research unfortunately walked out of here a few minutes ago, so...

Chuck Cairns: I think she just left. She didn't just walk out – walk out. Right, right.

Eric Raimy: She looked like she had some place to be.

Chuck Cairns: Right, okay. Just checking.

Eric Raimy: No, as I said, I believe that these results are just beginning to accrue, and so as with any other results, they need to be replicated and looked at and reconsidered and treated with the proper care.

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: I'd be interested, for example, if there's any way to test whether a foot frequency effect might exist in there.

Chuck Cairns: Did you say...

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: Foot.

Chuck Cairns: Oh, foot. What we're discussing might be the topic of next year's conference, so... Harry.

Harry van der Hulst: Another thing on the list, or at least, on my list that I want to correct an impression that I may have made yesterday when Francois Dell's work came up, I said, "That can't be right," or something like that. Of course what I meant was that if I'm right, or on the right track, then my challenge is to account for these generalizations that they make in that work in a way that is at least comparable in terms of explanatory value. So I wasn't saying that these things couldn't be right or that these generalizations aren't right. It was my challenge and my responsibility to show that if I assume that there are these syllabic constituents or these particular constraints, then I have to show that I can come up with the same... with an account of these generalizations that is at least comparable. So that's what I will put on my list, because I realize that a lot of what we say about syllables is based on a fairly limited set of languages, either languages that have hardly any structure at all, CV languages, or languages like Dutch and other Indo-European languages that have these particular types of clusters. So that's a big challenge, to look at these languages that are in other families and that... again, if anybody who talks about syllables is right, then anybody that says that you couldn't have an obstruent being the nucleus or the head of the syllable, then I'd better deal with these generalizations.

Chuck Cairns: I think I saw another... yes.

Vsevolad Kapatinski: I'd like to add another phenomenon that a theory of constituency or lack thereof could also explain. And the basic difference between a theory that says that there is a constituent for the syllable and a theory that says that there isn't is that a theory that says that there is says that there is some kind of a separate representation for a linguistic chunk, for the syllable, and the listeners are therefore particularly likely to parse out that chunk as an acoustic segment, and also that it's going to be easier for them to form an association between that chunk and some other chunks, as opposed to between some random string of acoustic signals and some other chunks.

Francois Dell: I have a hard time understanding this point, I think, that Harry made ____ yesterday. Even if we never find any correlates in word boundaries in a language, that wouldn't force us to abandon the notion of the word. Really, it's something that, if we find some phonetic evidence, some phonetic cues for syllable boundaries, so much the better. But if we don't, I don't see what follows from that. The evidence for syllables still stands.

Vsevolad Kapatinski: I wasn't talking about phonetic cues for syllables. I was rather thinking about psychological imposition of structure on the acoustic signal that listeners do in terms of parsing the acoustic signal into chunks that they can store in their memories.

Bill Idsardi: There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of evidence about that, but it's entirely equivocal. So if you look at morpheme identification, the question is, are sub-syllabic morphemes like the English plural more or less likely as constructs as opposed to full syllable ____ identifications of morphemes. And the evidence is that kids have no particular problem with sub-syllabic morphemes. But that's psychological identification of a unit, a pairing of a unit with another unit, and I don't see that there's any huge bias to say that the morphemes are going to have to coincide with the syllable boundaries. Yet there's something where we know absolutely that they store them in memory. So, the evidence is entirely equivocal as to what that sort of psycholinguistic technique which you want to use... is it going to diagnose, is it going to be easier to pair things that are syllables with a meaning in this case, or is it not? Well, the problem is there are all sorts of other parses available, so it could parse as a segment so the question is, why should the syllable have any privileged status with respect to any particular psycholinguistic experiment?

Vsevolad Kapatinski: Right, it's true that there are other units that could also be parsed out of the signal, so you could parse out the morpheme or you could parse out the syllable, and when those parses conflict, then you could go with either one. But if there is a situation where a particular string of the acoustic signal doesn't correspond to any constituent, then it seems to be very unlikely that a listener could eventually parse that out. And in my poster yesterday, for instance, I had shown that in English syllables, listeners find it much easier to learn associations within rimes and affixes than bodies and affixes. They are more likely to parse out the rime than the body.

Anthony Lewis: I think it's equivalent to saying that you can have a syntactic constituent of five individual words as an important unit, as a syntactic constituent, as opposed to say, two words from this type of phrase and two from another, and at the same time still honor that you can have the individual units that make up that syntactic constituent still the meaningful units _____.

Ranjan Sen(?): I would like to say again that when we're talking about the relationship between whatever constituent we want to argue for or against and phonetics, we should always remember that phonetics isn't just the acoustic signal. So we can look at the acoustic signal and see peaks and troughs and vowel-ness, which correspond to the syllable, but then again, we will not, when we look at the acoustic signal, readily find evidence for the kind of abstract planning between consonant and vowel gestures, which we are now getting good evidence for, which Jason just mentioned. So merely looking at the acoustic signal is not exhausting the ways to investigate whether something has a correlate in phonetics. We should be careful not to interconnect _____.

Shanti Ulfsbjoerninn: But if you presuppose an underlying structure, let's say, like the strict CV as they branch down _____ or you just have CVCVCVCV, then that whole phonetic planning is only like circumstantial evidence, in the sense that you get languages in which that is... you get a nice kind of relationship between, or a nice contrast between C and V. But then you go _____ in which you just have your CVCVCV and it looks like you can stick almost anything in those.

Ranjan Sen: I'm not talking about theories that presuppose... this is very sophisticated argumentation for why we would say that gestures and planning are this way and not that, which are now coming out of studies like _____

Jason Shaw: You can't _____ At some level of abstraction, you might see the same type of priming relationship between an onset and a nucleus in Berber, where both are consonants, and a /p/ and an /a/ in another language. If you're willing to look at that level of abstraction, then it's at least a hypothesis that's out there that there is some level at which you can prime, kind of similarities in the priming relation that reflect some higher level structure.

Chuck Cairns: Can we maybe modularize the discussion for the point of view of further in the discussion online and into the future? We've been talking about syllable-related phenomena at a number of different levels, and Paul started off the conversation by talking about the kinds of phenomena that have traditionally been sort of within the core sets of phenomena that phonology has tried to explain: phonotactics, linguistic phonetic sort of stuff like aspiration, glottalization, typology, allomorph selection, and things sort of like that, as opposed to more concrete things like phonetic planning. Is it useful to distinguish, to make that kind of distinction, and to sort of modularize the discussion so that it's not necessarily the case that the set of arguments that you're going to use for one are going to be the same as the set of arguments that you're going to use for the other? What do people think of that kind of distinction?

Stephanie Shattuck-Hufagel: I think you need a third category called "other."

Chuck Cairns. Yeah. Yes.

Unknown: I think that one point also is that the discussion is getting difficult because we're talking about something we never defined clearly. The only thing we can be sure about talking about syllables is that everyone almost in this room would agree that CV is a syllable. The remaining, it's totally unclear. Whether CVC is a syllable, CCV is a syllable, or two or three, we don't know. So I think one starting point could be asking people to challenge themselves in saying, if you claim that CCV is a syllable, then you have to make the point clear that it is really a syllable. The same for CVC, and then... otherwise we will be talking, talking, talking, nobody will be able to challenge each analysis against each other.

Harry van der Hulst: No, but there is no agreement that even CV is a syllable.

Chuck Cairns: Does anybody disagree that even CV is a syllable?

Unknown 3: It's just a sequence.

Unknown 4: It could be.

Chuck Cairns: Okay. But does anybody say, "no"?

Anthony Lewis: I would say no in light of San's paper, where you have two segments being judged as one, so are you defining the C of your CV as possibly consisting of two segments? I really liked his analysis as looking at that onset consonant as a combination of _____ gestures, or something like that, so I don't think there is a unanimous take on that.

Chuck Cairns: San?

San Duanmu: The onset is a mystery. In my analysis, the metrical principle is true, and there is a trochaic foot only, so CVX is a free C and VX is a troche and CV, it is hard to say. But the onset doesn't seem to be required as part of the syllable. It just was something thrown out by CV syllables, so it looks like it's hanging around, and I'm fine with it being part of the syllable, but if you really think very carefully, I think I cannot understand why you need that C there. But I want to make a point. I think we probably are talking about issues that are too philosophical here, that will actually hinder student research, because in a biology department, nobody talks about what is life. So we actually, perhaps it would be more useful to think about what are the things that are useful for us to do that will either generate new data or it will simplify some previous theory. And then talk about these afterwards. So, I don't want to _____ my own new research. I didn't really want to assume there is a syllable, but I just go through the distribution patterns and see how hard it has to be, and I end up seeing that it's really CVX, and that is a surprise. In the end, I didn't claim that it must be some fundamental unit. It could be derivable from a new structure, and I haven't done the work on that side, so I can't claim, but I think there's progress here. I didn't even try to define what the syllable is, but these kinds of things would be very useful. I'm not bothered by what a syllable is, but by not answering that question, you end up perhaps learning more to the answer.

Eric Raimy: So what you're suggesting is massive amounts of homework on the syllable for all our students.

San Duanmu: It's hard to say. You know, it's hard to say ahead of time what to look at and I tries a lot of other things that didn't work out, but I think progress can be made in different ways. You keep thinking what the definition is and try to come up with a definition, but that's only one way of... it's like philosophy. Then there is danger there.

Eric Raimy: Right, no, I was joking. I think this is the same point that Stephanie made. It's that we appear to be in this conundrum that we don't know exactly what to do, so we have to take it in steps. If we don't know what to do, then I think we have to be very ecumenical, which is the term that was used yesterday, to allow, just, we need to take steps. So I think that's a great suggestion: that we need to just do more work so we can actually work on the problem.

Ranjan Sen(?): Can I draw on an aspect of that last point and something that Paul said previously? As a person who, I call myself a phonologist, but also I work in the field, and so I have to describe the language that I'm working with, people like me want tools and so a very good thing to do, and maybe something to put on our list is, as we develop our theories, don't only say what we've managed to describe, but say what we'd like to know better that's out there, because if I'm going to describe the phonology of a language, I don't have time to cover the fifty latest theories of the syllable or the non-syllable, plus everything that's happened in the last fifty years. But if I do know that there's a list of things which people want to know about, I can say, "well, I've got some data that here that's relevant for this." So it's useful, obviously not immediately for yourself to say, "I'd like to know about this," but if you do say that, then there will be other people like me around who will come to you with the data you may want. And what you are doing will be much more useful.

Eric Raimy: It's 5:30.

Chuck Cairns: 5:30, good. Paul.

Paul Kiparsky: I thought I'd tell you a story. I'm quite possibly the only person here who was present at the reinvention of the syllable in 1966. And I do know that it wasn't there in the Jakobson feature system and that Chomsky and Halle tried to write the Sound Pattern of English without the syllable and then they discovered that they couldn't do it, so finally in 1966, I think it was in the fall, they decided, "let's have the feature" plus or minus syllabic. The wrong move, but in some sense it was right...

Chuck Cairns: ... the only thing they could do.

Paul Kiparsky: And it was immediately a great hit. Everybody was saying there were all sorts of types of things you could do with it. I remember in particular that there was a French visitor, Jean-Claude Milner, who came and said, "ah, now I have what I need for the theory of French verse." [laughs in the audience]

Francois Dell: You gave him a German accent. [laughs in the audience]

Paul Kiparsky: Sorry about that. [laughs in the audience]

Chuck Cairns: So, we have the room until six. Do people want to go further? We can do that. We have the restaurant reservation at six, so do people want to go further now? I see people are taking leave-taking gestures, so I guess we've come to a natural conclusion of the discussion. Thanks.

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